220 THE HORSE AND HIS RIDER. 



transmit to the poor animal, as a gift from Heaven, the 

 benefit of any scientific discovery that may save him 

 from unnecessary and indescribable agony under opera- 

 tions almost all of which are prescribed either for the 

 self interest, pride, or fashions of his master. 



But although the avowed object of the criminal laws of 

 England is to prevent crime by the infliction of a scale of 

 punishments which, fearful enough to deter the guiltiest, 

 are all divested, so far as science can devise, of bodily pain ; 

 although we deprecate any suffering on the tread-mill be- 

 yond that of ordinary hard labour; and although even 

 for the murderer we have invented a machinery of rope, 

 planks, and bolts to produce a sudden and almost painless 

 death, yet, until lately, people of both sexes, of all ages, 

 and of every sort and condition, have under the surgeon's 

 knife been subjected to tortures which it would have 

 been beyond the ingenuity of the most merciless tyrant 

 that ever existed to have invented. 



The screams, however, which have resounded through- 

 out the civilized world in private houses, in palaces, in 

 cottages, on the field of battle, between the decks of men- 

 of-war, and through the doors and windows of all public 

 hospitals, have lately, by the command and blessing of 

 Almighty God, been suddenly stopped by the administra- 

 tion of chloroform, which now, diluted in the proportion 



